Rubens, Peace and War

I write this as I am working on a painting (pastel) of Rubens's Peace and War, or Minerva Protects Pax from Mars.

It is one of my present series of Autobiography in Pictures, in other words, recollections of incidents in my past with a written piece and a picture to go with it - or a picture with a written piece to go with it.

So how does a Rubens enter the fray?

When I bought a bombed-out house just after the war near Chelsea Football Ground, London, and rebuilt it to the height of the second floor, incorporating a studio, I had ample wall space to cover. Why not cover one wall with a large mural of Rubens, just to enter a corner of his mind when he painted this particular picture, now in the National Gallery?

It would be an interesting artistic experience for one comparatively new to professional art, having just been to art school and painting landscape and designing for the theater?

Within all my pictures are related shapes that form a basic design. 

This particular painting is a conglomeration of naked ladies, cherubs, soldier, leopard, drapery, and hidden shapes in dark stormy clouds. It is fun, but to me a difficult composition, ripe to unravel with my present eye and memory.

Soon after I had completed the mural, in about 1953 perhaps, I decided (or was commissioned, I don't recall) to paint a large self-portrait, in the background of which was my Rubens on the studio wall.

Now, in 2021, I am pulling my interpreted mural apart and including myself as an artist within the picture. It has taken me four A4 size pastels to see what to keep, what to discard and what to re-design. You muck around with a Rubens at your peril. This has taken some weeks.

Now I have got to the stage of drawing my design in pencil on an A1 size card. This, too, has been altered many times. Now it is time to add colour. At this stage it is a momentous move and I am shaking a bit.

With my coloured composition in a satisfactory state the time has come -as is my wont - to paint a mount around it. And within this mount I also not only want to give the painting a setting within the studio, but also to incorporate within it the impression that there is a tall double studio door at one side of the room and a window on the other, I turned over several ideas in my brain and finally settled on a single angle line on either side. 

I made a few very minor alterations before taking the work outside, to lay it down in the garden and spray it well with fixative.

Next came signing it and giving it a studio stamp enclosing its reference number, and then finding a frame once used to hold an aeroplane picture exhibited at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street.

The painting now hangs on a downstairs wall at home.

I really don't know if anyone will want it, but this whole series is primarily done for myself, recalling parts of my life in paintings and words.

Ducting Air

I think I'm right in saying that atmospheric pressure decreases with height. Thus, the air inside the top of a tall chimney is of a lower pressure than that inside the bottom of the chimney. So nature and brickwork can provide an up draught of air at no cost or use of machinery.

In a very small way I wanted to use this principle twice in a house that I was designing for myself in the early 1960s.

In one instance, I ducted outside air beneath floor level to below a fire's grate, controlling its volume with a butterfly valve, also below floor level, allowing nature to cause an up draught for the fire's smoke (aided, of course, by heat generated by the fire itself). To make fire work efficiently a draught is necessary. In a house this arrives generally through ill-fitting doors and windows. So the underfloor method prevents unwanted draughts and stiff necks.

Therefore I designed and built a second chimney right next to the fire's chimney. For this one I also ducted in air beneath the floor from outside to be warmed by the real chimney's heat. This transfer-heated air was directed straight into a bedroom above, controlled there by an adjustable grill.

Openings for the vent pipes outside had to be vermin-proofed with wire mesh. 

I sold the house to Francis Bacon, the painter, when I decided that I had cut myself off too severely from metropolitan life. Even a blue tit had decided to roost in my bedroom.

Francis was bewildered by the above chimney innovations and ducts, so invited me to visit and explain them to him. We got on so well that he invited me to stay, but with only one bedroom and an internal balcony, and his boy friend George Dyer in residence, I declined the offer.

But I went there again for lunch of raw kippers, decorated with raw onion rings, with Champagne to drink.

Perhaps not being one of his coterie in any way and not being on the make, we became good friends.

Buyers Beware

 With the lockdown imposed to tackle the Covid-19 virus, we watch a little more television than usual.

One of the programmes that Margreet enjoys is when potential buyers of property are shown around houses by presenters who adhere to a formula and sometimes emulate estate agents.

It is fascinating to notice that buyers, especially those who are interested in moving to the country from town, are almost invariably impressed by BEAMS. Beams are simply items of construction, seen inside more often when exposed by the lack of such as plasterboard covering. Beams are for holding up roofs, supporting floors and, in some old properties (and brand new ones), forming the very framework of the building itself. The gaps between timbers of an old wooden framework may be filled with bricks or some sort of plaster-alike substance, depending on the prevailing methods of its period or district availability.

What fascinates me, and is yet to be mentioned by any presenter that I have seen or heard, are those usually black-painted Xs, round discs or S-shaped additions, apparently stuck to the wall of an old house at random.

They are not mentioned for a very good reason (on the part of the salesman or -woman) because they are there to prevent a bulging wall from bulging further or even collapsing. They should be a warning to potential buyers that either the wall itself is faulty or, having bulged outwards, come away in some degree from the internal floor joists directly behind them.

These, usually cast iron "plates", are attached to either end of metal tie rods that lie close to ceiling joists and pass from one side of the house to the other.

The plates are attached to a tie rod's screw-threaded ends by nuts on washers.

I wondered if these faulty walls might be flattened by the nuts being tightened over time. But I believe that this course of action is not to be recommended. With frail bricks or stonework, one could see why.

Buyers beware.